Kim’s Cheerleaders Revive North Korean Dance Diplomacy

South Korean protesters hold banners and flags during a rally, a day after North Korea announced that they had conducted a third nuclear test, in Seoul, on Feb. 13, 2013. Following its latest underground detonation in February last year, the North threatened to strike the U.S. and South Korea with nuclear missiles, claiming it had succeeded in making its warheads smaller and lighter. Photography: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

July 8 (Bloomberg) -- The group of young North Korean women
in white cheer-leading uniforms scrambled from their buses and
climbed a pole to pull down a welcome banner during an
international athletic competition in South Korea in 2003.

The sign, put up by local residents, showed a photo of then
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il shaking hands with former South
Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The women, dubbed a “legion of
beauties” by the South’s media, told reporters they were angry
that an image of their “Dear General” may be soaked by rain.

The scene underscores the conflicting symbolism of North
Korea’s decision after a nine-year hiatus to send a cheerleader
squad to the South for the Asian Games this year. While many
South Koreans associate them with a period of detente that also
included the development of a joint industrial park and a cross-border tourism program, the women serve as a propaganda tool for
a regime trying to divert global attention from human rights
abuses and nuclear weapons.

“The dispatch of young, playful and gorgeous cheerleaders
is intended to help enhance the North’s dark, poverty-stricken
and totalitarian image abroad,” Kim Jung Bong, a political
science teacher at Hanzhong University in the South, said by
phone today. “The North thinks that if the cheerleaders succeed
in changing that perception among South Koreans toward the North
positively, that will pressure President Park Geun Hye to engage
the North more actively through concessions.”

Future First Lady

South Korea said yesterday it would accept the cheerleaders
along with a team of North Korean athletes that had already been
scheduled to participate in the games in Incheon this September.
At the same time, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman
Kim Eui Do criticized what he called the North’s irrational
claim that its nuclear weapons development can safeguard the
people of both Koreas.

The 2003 cheering squad was the second of three groups to
appear in the South at sporting events, with members handpicked
from the children of ruling party and military officials. In
2005, they included Ri Sol Ju, then a teenager and now the
country’s first lady. Ri was unveiled in 2012 as the wife of
current leader Kim Jong Un, who took over the country upon the
death of his father Kim Jong Il in late 2011.

While the South’s media covered the squads favorably, the
2003 incident with the banner was a reminder of the deep
psychological and emotional divide the two nations would face in
the event of unification, with two starkly different systems in
place since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

Nuclear Missiles

The period of improving relations between the two Koreas
hit turbulence in 2006 after the North conducted the first of
its three nuclear tests and began touting atomic development as
a deterrent against what it calls U.S. hostility.

Following its latest underground detonation in February
last year, the North threatened to strike the U.S. and South
Korea with nuclear missiles, claiming it had succeeded in making
its warheads smaller and lighter.

The sinking of a South Korean warship and the North’s
bombardment of a South Korean island in 2010 have also damaged
ties. The North denies a role in the sinking while saying it was
provoked into firing artillery at Yeonpyeong island.

North Korea’s said in its statement yesterday on the plan
to send cheerleaders that hostility on the peninsula has
“reached the extremes,” calling for “reconciliation and
unity.”

Negotiation Tactic

“I think this is one of North Korea’s negotiation
tactics,” said Hideshi Takesada, a professor at the Institute
of World Studies of Takushoku University in Tokyo. The North is
aware South Korea wants to improve relations because ties
between Kim’s regime and Japan have improved, he said.

Japan decided July 3 to ease sanctions on North Korea after
the North said it would begin a new probe into abductees and
other Japanese in the country.

South Korea says the North must end its pursuit of nuclear
arms, acknowledge its attack on the South’s Cheonan warship and
apologize officially for the 2008 death of a tourist at Mt.
Geumgang, among other concessions, before it can resume economic
assistance last seen during the detente.

North Korea’s gesture comes days after Park hosted Chinese
President Xi Jinping at a summit in Seoul, where both made clear
their opposition to the development of nuclear arms on the
Korean peninsula. China is the North’s biggest political ally
and economic benefactor and has sought to revive international
aid-for-disarmament talks it chairs.